Over 77% of all cyber crimes target small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) and yet, research shows 42% of small and midsize businesses don’t see cyber crime as a risk. Securing your growing enterprise against cyber threats is critical, but it takes time and resources away from growth activities. The problem only gets worse when traditional security solutions fail to stop advanced attacks.

Overview:

Many industry reports indicate that small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) are at particular risk from sophisticated cyber attackers. In fact, 77% of all cyber crime targets SMEs. But financial constraints can make it difficult for SMEs to obtain the resources they need to protect themselves against advanced threats.

An essential baseline of security needs a detect-and-prevent strategy to protect against advanced threats, with a response readiness plan for unforeseen incidents. Award-winning FireEye technologies help detect and stop multi-stage and multi-vector attacks. They arm security teams with accurate and contextual insights to immediately execute a response plan on their own or through a partner. Services from FireEye and its partners also complement these proactive technologies to help organizations with incident response.

These effective solutions are designed to be easy for SMEs to access and use, and allow them to focus on growing their business.

The Challenge

Governments and large enterprises have known about advanced threats for some time and have gradually implemented security frameworks and adopted technologies to reduce the risk and impact of a data breach. These organizations typically have spending flexibility in their security budgets, or have legal or regulatory mandates to justify the cost of security. The challenge for SMEs is they lack the advantages of their larger counterparts, but face similar risks.

Although the news tends to focus on large breaches, SMEs are often the principal targets of cybercrime.1 Why? Because SMEs have more assets (such as credit card numbers, identity information, health information, intellectual property) than an individual, but less security than larger enterprises — putting them in the attackers “sweet spot.”

Many SMEs are also targets because they provide business process outsourcing (BPO) or information technology enabled services (ITES) to larger organizations. Attackers exploit this trust, infiltrate the weaker link and then move laterally to a more significant target. Attackers tend to follow the path of least resistance to attain their goals.

Large enterprises are increasingly scrutinizing their supply chain to identify providers who can demonstrate a high degree of cyber security due diligence. SMEs will need to implement higher levels of advanced prevention and detection capabilities to meet those requirements and grow their business.

Spear-phishing emails and ransomware are increasing risks for SMEs due to inadequate security. SMEs may not consider themselves targets, but weak security makes them easy targets for the smash-and-grab approach of ransomware.

Legacy signature-based security technologies are ineffective against these threats because they are often polymorphic, intentionally designed to avoid exhibiting any previous signature. Ultimately, SMEs need to address advanced threats and ransomware risks. This is because it’s been estimated that half of the small businesses that suffer a cyber attack go out of business within six months.

The powerful FireEye Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine is at the heart of FireEye technologies. It helps identify advanced multi-stage attacks and blended threats that span multiple attack surfaces, including the web and email, that otherwise may not appear malicious when viewed in isolation.

The correlation of malicious URLs with spear-phishing emails is critical to identify the opening salvo of many multi-vector attacks as shown in Figure 1. Visibility into this linkage enables organizations to see how the two events are related and automatically blocks subsequent stages of the attack, such as attackers trying to transfer stolen data over the web. It also identifies and blocks subsequent attacks that use similar tactics, tools and procedures (TTPs).

With a high degree of automation, efficiency and efficacy, this solution enables organizations to simplify deployment and day-to-day management of both network and email security, and improve their security posture.

Features:

Fortifies your cyber defenses

Modern cyber crimes go beyond nuisance attacks. Given the number and severity of cyber attacks against smaller enterprises, it’s no surprise that 60% of victims go out of business within six months of a breach.

Well-funded, organized groups launch advanced threats against your organization for specific information you possess. Attackers will often target smaller companies who supply larger organizations with products or services. By establishing a foothold in the smaller companies, they can ultimately reach more valuable targets. And 90% of the time, they initiate their attacks using email and the web.

The FireEye Network Security + ETP solution is designed to detect and block email- and web-based attacks

at a cost you can manage

without adding stress to your security resources

other solutions miss by correlating email and web activities that seem harmless when viewed in isolation

Designed for your growing enterprise

Whether you have a one-person IT department, or a security team that’s expanding its skills and resources, the Network Security + ETP solution can meet your advanced security needs and budget.

The solution deploys in under sixty minutes. You can also easily integrate it with existing security products – there is no need to define and configure additional rules or policies. Once you set the FireEye solution, it doesn’t require continual tuning to modify existing security policies. Your software is upgraded automatically – no manual updates or patching required!

The ETP solution deployed in the cloud to simplify deployment and management tasks. And because you probably already have basic protection against commodity threats, the ETP solution integrates seamlessly with the security offered by Microsoft Exchange Online and Gmail.

Committed to stopping advanced threats

Commodity threats are not our focus.

In a recent survey, FireEye discovered that 100% of cyber attack victims had up-to-date virus signatures. However, up to 90% of malware is unique to an organization.

The Network Security + ETP solution combats advanced and unique cyber threats such as spear-phishing emails and ransomware so your organization can run smoothly without distractions, disruptions or wasted effort.

Effective defense against targeted attacks

The most important thing about targeted attacks is that they are customized to your organization. The attacker researches your vulnerabilities, identifies your critical assets and develops an attack strategy to achieve their objective.

FireEye has likewise created a targeted defense, the Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine scans and tests your email and web traffic against thousands of possible computer configurations to track down suspicious activity. When it scans email, it looks at both embedded URLs as well as any attachment. Web activity is scanned as interactions – as if a human visited those pages and clicked through all the links to download various resources.

Accelerates response with actionable intelligence

Every security solution comes with alerts – indicators that something seems wrong. And the more security systems you have, the more alerts you get, because these systems often have no intelligence behind them to evaluate, validate and prioritize their alerts. Barely 19% of alerts are actually important, and because security teams can only investigate about 4% of all alerts, they waste a lot of time sifting through unreliable alerts.

FireEye is different. The MVX engine feeds and references the FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence database in real time. This allows it to validate its own alerts and virtually eliminate false positives, which are alerts that indicate malicious activity where none actually exists. Your security staff won’t be overwhelmed with alerts. They can spend more time investigating real threats.

Detection and Prevention Technology:

Network Security Essentials

FireEye Network Security Essentials is an affordable, plugand-play network security solution that can be deployed in under 60 minutes. It minimizes the risk of costly breaches by detecting and stopping known and unknown networkbased cyber attacks. It uses the MVX engine to analyze web traffic to detect exploits, malware executables and multiprotocol callbacks. It also includes an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) with conventional signature matching to detect common attacks and provides riskware protection to block spyware and adware. Unlike conventional or next-generation firewalls, stand-alone IPS or antivirus (AV) solutions, Network Security Essentials detects both known and unknown, zero-day attacks with high accuracy while generating low rates of false positives.

Email Security: Email Threat Protection Cloud (ETP)

Email is often the opening salvo of major breaches. FireEye ETP is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that analyzes email for signs of spear phishing as well as commodity virus or spam threats.

Threat Intelligence

Cloud-based FireEye Threat Intelligence draws on our proprietary access to intelligence data from globallydeployed sensors and accompanies alerts from the FireEye solution. The intelligence, updated every 60 minutes, includes information on new malware profiles, vulnerability exploits and threat findings. It complements the MVX engine with cloud-enabled analytics and machine-learning technologies to detect advanced threats.

FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence (DTI) provides hourly updates on anonymously exchanged data on web-, email- and file-based threats across the FireEye global cloud network. The updates ensure the most recent attacks FireEye has seen across its global network of customers are found and blocked. DTI is available with Network Security Essentials.

FireEye Advanced Threat Intelligence (ATI) provides rich adversary and victim intelligence gathered by threat intelligence analysts and incident responders. As a result, FireEye attack alerts may include valuable contextual information, such as possible threat actor identity, likely motives and malware details. This makes the solution more efficient at detecting both highly targeted zero-day attacks and known malware and helps security professionals stay ahead of and stop threat actors. ATI is standard with ETP.

Deployment Options

The Essential Security solution can be deployed inline for greater control and real-time response to stop attacks in progress as shown in Figure 2.

Some organizations prefer to start with a more conservative approach, so it can also be deployed in out-of-band or monitor-only modes (BCC mode for ETP) as shown in Figure 3. In this deployment, all traffic is monitored for malicious activity and a report is generated but there is no automated prevention mechanism. FireEye or our partners can help you determine and deploy the option that best fits your needs.